


Liquid (Sketches from the Side of Town I Used to Live)

by crankyoldman



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Horror, Songfic, Substance Abuse, failures in heterosex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-17
Updated: 2009-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-31 20:44:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 11,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crankyoldman/pseuds/crankyoldman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A horror in ten acts about a place and a marriage. Set to the Recoil album "Liquid".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Black Box Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2008, this is a new edit that smooths out a few things. Not a lot has changed.

_The weather was absolutely perfect on this morning, so we could see everything very clearly. You knew that there had been a terrible eruption but you couldn’t see any machinery, you just see this collapsing ice._

The relief had lasted until they pulled up to the apartment complex and got out of the car. The seams of her smile started to fray as she stepped over the cracks of the sidewalk, breaking up her usually even stride into a kind of _hop hop skip hop_ that made her seem all the younger. When he held open the door, an exaggerated gesture, he said:

"It'll be alright, we're home now."

It wasn't always about the apartment on the side of town where the old ladies in their houses with the manicured lawns closed the shutters when the entirely unsubtle dealers came out. When the tired working man's bar opened up for the evening they would turn up their game shows and drown out the arguments.

Once, it had been about going _further_.

The dirty dishes and the dirty bathroom and the dirty laundry was a combination of smells that she'd learned not to notice, but upon entering the place it took all her willpower to not let the disgust show in her face.

"I'm going to take a nap, I need to work later." He said.

She nodded, and took up her position on the couch, the side with the least amount of stains and old canine smell. He put in a movie to drown the silence, since she couldn't find any words to speak anymore. He looked her full in the face and licked his lips before he spoke again, since she wouldn't:

"This is where you belong."

The thing about liquid is that you can never hold onto it very well.


	2. Want

_I want to know how it'll end._

Everything was white. The counter, the kitchen floor, her dress, the bathtub, and even her panties. It smelled faintly of disinfectant and carpet cleaner and the musky scent that men get when they want something. But she kept sipping the frigid pale gold of the mead and eying his white white tie over a slightly wrinkled and off-white shirt.

"So, is this really happening?"

Their shy Hallmark smiles and schoolyard giggles were the kinds of things they were both too old for, but they were the types that assumed they would always be overlooked. She'd just lost her ambition and he was never the type to have one to begin with. Fate or something like it, that was what it was, finding each other like they did.

And it was _romantic_ knowing that she wouldn't die **alone**.

"What, breaking the law? I still can't believe my parents bought us _alcohol_ as a present."

"It's traditional or something."

"It's tasty, though. Plus it's a bullshit law anyway."

She supposed the nervousness was how it had been since the beginning of the time of tradition. Their families had wildly different and yet strangely the same in their rituals and generational incantations. It had been so pretty to be able to wear white honestly and without pretense, and it had been pretty to have purple-blue flowers instead of roses.

_I want to be sure of what it'll cost._

Her sixty dollar outline of white gold around her left ring finger matched the sheen of the light fixtures and the sparkle of the faucet. The new apartment feel hadn't worn off yet, and maybe it wouldn't for a while. She'd been so surprised to see that he'd arranged everything they'd moved in a few days before. Most things were secondhand and their dining table was a Wal-Mart special, but there was something beautiful to it.

Maybe because it was theirs. Not hers, not his; _theirs_.

She'd taken for granted the full stomach and the ability to just ask for money when she needed it. He was going to teach her the ways of a blue collar family, and again, she couldn't help but find a little romance in the idea. After all, poets and writers who experienced something other than the easy life came out as something more. Something better.

She was going to make him better too.

"So you really liked dinner?"

"I never had food like this growing up... it's _different_ in a good way."

One meal in a box--just add hamburger. She'd eaten some pretty exotic things in her time, but there was a certain novelty to the sodium enriched mess of noodles and meat.

But that had been hours ago, and it was getting dark. Eventually she would run out of honey mead in her glass. He had just finished his off with a sour face--it was a little too rich for his homespun type of blood. The gold of his hair was tarnished with ash brown and oil, so it only made sense that things like glamor did nothing for his Nordic sensibilities. She would just finish the mead herself, later.

She loosened the smooth white tie.

\---

_I want to strangle the stars for all they promised me._

There hadn't been much red, even if it hurt like hell. But she'd been prepared as she could have been, and this just sealed the deal. She hadn't expected much for the first time, and he held onto her in the dark with a sort of desperation that was comforting.

She needed this kind of strength around her, and this kind of gentleness as a warm breath on her neck.

"It's too bad you have to work nights, you can't always be here when I go to sleep."

Like any good artist of words, he knew what to say. "But I'll always be here when you wake."

_I want to keep you alive so there is always the possibility of murder later._

\---

He was up to his elbows in dishwater, the soap bubbles sometimes escaping into the air and floating for a few minutes before popping. She was sorting laundry, tossing in his sweat-smelling work clothes with her student's uniform of jeans and tee-shirts. They had discovered that the laundry room downstairs didn't dry things as well as it should have, so the previous day's laundry work hung off of doors, the one chair, the couch--anything that could be used.

_I want to be there when you learn the cost of desire._

"This is only a week's worth of stuff and only two of us..." she muttered loud enough so that he could hear.

He flicked some of the just grimed water at her. "Hey, it was either the laundry or the dishes."

They were democratic like that. Besides, the honeymoon wasn't quite over yet, even if real life was encroaching on their little haven by missing socks and cracked dishes. She was the kind of person that took in details everywhere she went--the curse of someone that wanted to be an artist but never let herself be one--and this was no exception.

Only now she was going to find every shred of beauty in the domestic. The rainbow in the soap bubbles, the multi grain of his hair, the spongy comfort of their generic carpet. She was going to take an element from each and make it gorgeous.

_I want you to understand that my malevolence is just a way to win._

"I'll turn you into a house-husband yet," she joked, not serious at all. The chores weren't an argument. They didn't argue at all. The only time they had was a result of her father, and it had been solved quickly. She didn't like it when they competed.

After all, that's what the councilor had said before. It wasn't a contest or a race. And the books she'd read in preparation too. Kind of like learning a language though. When he spoke, it was always smooth. She'd work on her own speech, which was still uneven, so they would make sense together.

Because by all other outward appearances, they didn't seem suited for each other at all.

"I'd sooner have kids, and you know that." Half-joking. It was a little strange, maybe, that tone. But then, she always tended to _poke poke poke_ at people until she hit a button. The books had said to avoid that.

"You sure you don't mind that I'll only cook on Tuesdays and Saturdays? It's just this semester has such a heavy course load." Maybe there was something of a 1950s housewife buried deep down. If she could cook, she'd have made him anything their collective money could buy.

Which would probably have still been ham sandwiches. But it was the thought, at least.

"You know I support you with what I can. Just focus on school."

_I want the name of the ruiner._


	3. Jezebel

  
_“Come on woman ain’t you ready to go? Of your evil deeds God’s done got tired, you got to go to judgment, stand trial."_   


When she waited for the bus in the mornings, next to the telephone pole with too many discarded cigarette butts around it, she could see the spires of what she knew was a church. Back home there weren't _cathedrals_ and neither were there here, but at least on this side of town she was high enough that they gave the impression of being cathedrals.

She didn't take much stock in people searching for a god.

Their church and country steeple had been more of a social thing, the kind of custom someone did when they were entering a tribe. She'd read volumes on his heathen ancestors, and despite his devout nature now, she knew that he was from a line of people that killed their gods and burned their golden halls. It was perhaps the only danger she kept in the back of her mind.

Now she couldn't see any of that, the haze of the heat made everything man-made blur into white and grey, while everything else blurred into green and brown.

"Are you lost, child?"

Oh, how she _frowned_ at that. She was only a child in her parents' eyes--they hadn't called, just left her with a bottle of mead that drained quicker than it should have--and she wouldn't have some random stranger call her a name like that.

"I just got turned around."

She, who never would sweat, was soaking through her shirt. August hit everyone hard, even someone as lithe and active as she was couldn't help but pant a little under the oppression of such a sun. Then again, this hill she'd decided to walk up after missing her bus home wasn't helping at all.

"Would you like some water? You look a little burned."

 _Charity._ It was one of those things that was supposed to be a good thing, but she always took it as an insult. As if she couldn't make it the rest of the way up to bright blue Pepsi machine and purchase something herself. Old women needed to stay out of her affairs.

"No thank you."

"Soda will just dry you out more. I promise not to drug you and take out your liver."

And she looked then, not just assuming it was a voice of someone that was just in the peripheral of her vision, a deviation from her path upward. The leather brown skin immediately made her think of something else she'd studied, yet another dead culture with exquisite imageries. She didn't fit on this side of town at all; too old, too friendly, too frank.

Nefertiti should have aged like that.

"That's just an urban legend anyway." She grinned though, and approached the throne of the old rickety porch. Nefertiti had a cooler next to her, and the many spangled bracelets on her arm didn't jangle, only chimed, as she reached in to grab a bottle. The refuge of the polluted river water wasn't so much a luxury as it seemed right then.

"Well, no one seems to trust anyone anymore."

She had to hold back the urge to say _look around_. This wasn't some disconnected suburban paradise. It was a forgotten port town from a bygone era. Trains, boats, cars; if they came at all, it was only to stop briefly and go through it. Sure, there was a college, but it was far enough that it felt like another world.

A pristine, central air world of glass and brick.

"For good reason." Maybe she sniffed it once, before chugging it down. "You have to look out for yourself, especially in some places."

She was too pale for the afternoon sun. Nefertiti seemed to only like the shade to darken the hollows of her wrinkles, a reminder that she might have been young when the trains and boats were arteries into the beating heart of industry. And to think she wouldn't notice, as enamored with history as she was.

"I'd be more wary of those kinds of places," Nefertiti said, extending a long elegant arm with skin that sagged in parts. Following the wrist brought her eyes across the river, to something that was almost a sanctuary in its own right.

It confused her.

"College? What's wrong with education?"

"Nothing wrong with it, just think we've got enough monuments around here. Don't you think so?" Nefertiti threw a scrap to a lazy dog that she hadn't even noticed before. He didn't even bother to raise his head.

"Whatever. Thanks for the water, I'd better be getting home before my husband starts to worry."

The old woman nodded her head, and with a chime, waved her home. Maybe she walked a little fast, a little like a spooked animal. She couldn't keep up the pace for long before the sun and the heat pinned her back into a slow plod.

\---

She thought of central air libraries when the water hit her back, and she shivered because she'd over-compensated, turning the temperature far too cold. It was silly, to think that she used to hate the cold artificial air, but with their small electric unit out, all she could do was try to keep from feeling feverish.

"Honey?"

He'd woken up.

"Yes?" Her mouth filled with water at her answer, and she almost choked.

"Why are you home so late?"

"Had to rest, the heat index is up. I'll be home earlier tomorrow."

He departed from the doorway, hopefully to make sandwiches. They were going to have sandwiches again for dinner, that was for certain. And water from the faucet, because they couldn't afford the luxury of bottles. It wasn't so bad once she got past the taste. Reality was starting to sink in a little.

Maybe the walk had been partly intentional, it was something she'd always done. Took the long road home when she needed to think. When she needed to talk things under her breath and let them come to pass.

It was a little hypocritical to begrudge people their gods, considering she kept coming across queens.

"Darling?"

She pulled her head fully out of the stream this time. "What?"

"You been keeping up with your readings? I thought we could talk about Kings today."


	4. Breath Control

_Who wouldn’t want a good girl, a soft hand, a gentle woman for a gentleman?_

In the night, she knew other people were doing what came naturally to them. It was an old apartment complex, and the walls, ceiling, floor, they were all thin. One couple in particular was obviously the BSDM type, for even her vivid imagination couldn't mask the "yes mistress" she heard when the isolation of the room was unbearable and she walked down to the mailroom.

Even on that ground level, a brisk walk down three flights of stairs from her home, she knew that the night was full of exchanges. Maybe there was a faint aristocratic undertone to her disgust, to her thoughts that drifted to being _better than some animal, something ruled by lust_.

But nights were long.

\---

And the mornings.

The act itself was natural and he caressed her in ways that were always gentle, always light. He never pinched unless she asked him to, he never held her down or made her. He never did anything that she did't let him do, like most of their courtship, he always asked. From the first kiss in the magical snow to the rutting on dirty smelling sheets he always asked.

He always asked.

Maybe it was the pill that did it, turned her desire into a dried up duty after the pain faded. The pain that lasted for weeks because she, like any good heroine in a movie coupling was smaller and younger than him, in all the ways that counted. The pain that lasted because he was a _man_ and she was a _woman_ and there were passages written about this kind of thing in holy books the world over about a certain Eve. The pain that made her wonder if she was damaged, but it went away before she got up the courage to go to a doctor.

And he always asked.

In courtship, it had never been a problem, because his religion and her self respect meant that it never went beyond what junior high kids and some elementary school ones did in alleys and boy-girl parties and damp movie theaters. They had figured out then where the pulses were, and it was always she who was the aggressor, she that whispered something in his ear and tugged at the jeans that were always too tight or too baggy depending on what work he was doing that year--the man fluctuated weight worse than a bulimic cheerleader.

On top, on the side, against the wall, on the carpet that smelled a little like cleaner with her face in it--always the same bile in her throat when it slid in, always the same relief when he threw the wrapper in the trash. She never trusted the pill and wanted to accuse it of a lot of things. Maybe the condom was just an accessory.

It couldn't have been his fault. He was _gentle_.

She turned inward on herself, looking for a root, an explanation, anything to make the sounds in her throat anything other than good acting. Once or twice they weren't acting, but that had to do with who was in **control** , she'd found. Most times no one was. Even then, she'd felt sick. But he said:

Look at me.

And all she wanted to do was look away. She preferred any position that required her to look away, and maybe... maybe pretend. There was an intimacy in looking someone in the eyes and she was never capable of it, not for the years of _courtship_ and not for the years she'd been with other guys. Not once had she ever looked one in the eye.

Only one she'd let in, and she spent the whole time praying in the beats of her breath for it to end.

"I had a long night..." he muttered into her shoulder, wrapping his strong workman's arms around her frail waist. The bed was so large at night, while he was working, and she'd gotten so sensitive to the pressure on the side of the bed and the shift of the air from breathing that she was awake even before he'd snaked himself around her.

Her eyes wide as she looked into the dark. "Not right now."

He always asked, but she had always said _yes_. And he sucked in his breath as if she had called him something else, maybe some other n word that didn't make sense in the context because he and his family were white. They were both like that, only his was closer to trash and hers was closer to privilege.

_Every woman has an itch, and every nice girl secretly wants to switch._

She was sick of the fluids, the liquid, disgusted with the biological certainty of it all. Which probably meant again that there was something _wrong_ with her--how could someone as young as she was, so newlywed, start to cringe at him coming...

\---

There was a girl on the bus she couldn't stop staring at.

She wasn't particularly pretty or extraordinary in any way. Her hair was more feather than hair from multiple dye jobs, and she dressed like a teenaged punk and goth scene reject, even though she was well into her twenties. All that black did nothing for the canary yellow on top. The girl was pasty. Starting to pudge out in unflattering places.

She called her Tweet, in her mind, because that was what she always did when she didn't know someone's name. She made one up.

Their schedules always crossed, it seemed, in the early class mornings. And Tweet always drew her attention, and she didn't know why. There was a self-possessed way that she moved, despite her many imperfections. Maybe that was it.

Sometimes Tweet's boyfriend was with her, a wiry Scarecrow. When Tweet was with her boyfriend, she didn't notice anything else. Sometimes Tweet was going to work, she surmised, from her shabby attempts at conservative attire that barely hid the wire of a tattoo on her neck.

Self-possession. She had to stop staring at strangers.

\---

"No, don't touch me."

"Why not, dear?"

"I don't like being teased."

But she was the one alone at night, unable to sleep because the building was old and every sound set her on edge. Staying up reading articles in the pale LCD light, hoping that someone answered. The ghost pale faces of the other girls on this side of town didn't provide any answer--they were merely scenery.

Once, there was no _other_ standing between them. They used to sit in his previous shabby apartment, content just to be part of the same presence.

_He said, "I know you’re looking for something that’s hard to find and I think I have what you have in mind."_

"I just can't do that right now... I have something I need to get over, I think."

She saw a girl in fishnets and spike heels, and she wanted to ask her how she could go out every night, didn't the walls watch her too? Didn't she hear the man and his _mistress_ , didn't she get up off her knees to see how the cracks and stains in the plaster looked like sex...

_And he led me to a glass case and looked deep into my face... "It’s just control."_

...or murder.


	5. Last Call For Liquid Courage

Mouths running with the same fervor as the tap, pinning trophies of aggression and new age barbarism to each other with hearty slaps to the back; she couldn't help but watch it for the five seconds it took to pass every time she walked home _that_ way. The German beer hall was a room posing as a building, where the last remaining factory men went to argue basketball teams and escape their wives and girlfriends.

The cold was waiting to snap these days, and sooner or later the dew point would tip heavy to ice. She was late, again, for the third time that week, but it couldn't be helped. Not wasn't, because that implied some form of intention on her part.

There were safer ways to cross town in the dark, places with more light island oases and sheltered public phone step stones. But there was a certain rebellion to walking home the darkest way, the way that people doing deals that weren't meant for escaped country girls to see went. Of course, this was a part of the appeal, the things she hadn't seen revealed before her.

And and and... this tenuous hold on a routine, this nibbling on _fidelity_ lingered in the back of her mind. She went places that she couldn't enter, imagining things that couldn't happen because she wasn't _that girl_.

_Sip still, gotta be enough. Wide palms slap skin, let the hitting begin! A done deal. Discarded piles of dignity. Another anonymous evening of absolute flesh._

His hands in the soapy water with suds that rose like beer foam, and he was asking her if she was going to be late again. And again. The momentary disgust of assumptions, her high academic mind going to that place again, where she liked to dangle logic supremely. Of course she couldn't control the schedules of pseudo-adults that hadn't thrown themselves into the fray of a personal life; teamwork was at its core an inconvenience.

Except the walk home.

The buses didn't run as long out there for a reason, and to hear the drunken caterwauling come from the last great German beer hall on the southeast side reason turned into reasons. The old ladies were home watching game shows by then, having fenced up their urban gardens and set their gnomes to watch the curb. She'd wanted to give them names too, like Shady on the corner, hopping from one foot to the other because he was too fly to wear a coat, but they barely peeked out of their curtained existences. To her they were all Babba Yaga with a touch of agoraphobia, though she'd yet to see any chicken legs sticking out from their foundations.

So so so, she gave the workermen names instead, too many to remember at any moment, and wondered what it would be like if she responded to the occasional offer to come inside and have a drink bought for her. She always hung her head when she shook it, like the shy girl she wasn't, because shy meant that she didn't revile the communication somewhat.

_And tonight, it’s got to be enough. It’s got to be enough. Sip another swig, let the night fill you. Stranger pour into you. Peel back what binds you, make you strong!_

It was a case study, she told herself, taking a new back alley and hearing two kids screaming at each other like murder, only to realize it was late night wrestling on television. Her husband didn't make enough for them to have cable, and she would only get a job to supplement the true essentials--which were covered. She didn't need much food anyway, if she had the fresh air once in a while. Even the garbage cans and dumpsters couldn't choke that out, because once the city ended, it was all farms.

Funny what five miles of land and an acre of mindset did.

Another bar, this one pretending it was something else besides the retreat of people uncreative in their pastimes and dull in their minds enough to require a little en _courage_ ment to be anything other than sacks of flesh. Only the workers had more than the gaseous nothing inside their flesh-molds these martini sippers had, sucking on their olives as if that was invitation enough. She'd take a 'hey baby' any day to that pretension. Like anyone was reverting to anything other than their basest selves in places like that, mammalian brains kicked into high gear but ironically slowed because courage only went so far.

And she, she was the observer now, steps suddenly making sense of the hop. Music wasn't understood until a person was exposed to its birthplace and natural environment, and while the Shadys of this spit of the world were only playing at one part of the rhythm, in the dark she was a part of all of it. Rusty track creaks, concrete pebbles, a twentieth century courtesan's laughter, the river, and even the irregular slobbers of too many _Natty Lights_ made backbeats and syncopation a pale comparison.

For for for even here with unnaturally orange-skinned girls and the stained undershirt boys in their motherfucking glory there was a pulse. When the real cities cut their wrists it came down the river, because everyone knew things got lost in the ocean, but in the river they could always be dredged out.

_And it’s ok, mostly. Today is tonight and tonight’s enough. Swallow still some sips, Hootchie mamma you is! Him hot for poker bid. Stuck his two cents in you. Done did make bid for next time but..there’s always a but at the end of nights like this. It’s got to be enough._

She held her ear to the washing machine, hoping to catch a little of the night in its cycle. Two floors sandwiched between her artist husband and her, which she liked for now. Not as if the building wasn't that third person in their marriage, the quiet one that liked to _watch_. It had born witness when she burned dinner again, her cooking nights always colored black and tasting like it came out of a bug zapper. There wasn't any of the night in an electric range and cast iron frying pan.

It stopped burning after three sips.

Folded his underwear into squares at the beginning and triangles by the time she could hear ghosts in the washing machines. She always figured Shady was packing a flask over a Special, because he wasn't the one in the slick black car that drove slowly by. They shared a coward dream, using the city beat as a way to direct their angry little centers of the universe back to their own eardrums. On the other side of the river they all had white wires to their iBrains, but here the whole street was an amplifier.

Oh oh oh maybe it was bad that in all the explorations and the same conversations with LennyBuckJoeKyle that lasted all five seconds it took to look at the place but was an inventory to their mine-stimulated cortexes-- _Hip, hand, thigh, back, calf, arm, ass, cheek, teeth, knee, heel, neck, elbow, ear, tongue, shoulder_ \--that it should come down to her husband setting a bottle of cheap vodka in front of her.

_You thinking it is 4am. Baby damn! What I gotta buy is all for a little pseudoaffectionado. A purry dreamic plead. Wanna lick it up? Quiz over every curve you got. Furry tongue making brown liquid slot. Enough tonight. You finally had enough. You had enough. Had enough? Enough!_

She decided then if she ever walked in, she was buying her own damn drink.


	6. Strange Hours

If she closed them, closed her eyes tight _tight_ tight she could ignore the fact they called it the graveyard shift and she was home alone.

\---

She used to think that pain was the only separation between the dream world and the real one, that if she had a Cartesian doubt she could just bite her tongue or stab herself in the thigh. By that logic and the dribble of blood that rolled from the corner of her mouth down, down to her chin before seeping into the yellowing white collar of her shirt, she was in fact in Reality.

Oh how she had scoffed at them, _them_ with their black eyeliner and safety pins thrust into earlobes, fingers, some with knives and some with pens, making paths and imprints on themselves to feel real. Because emotional pain wasn't enough, it lied, it twisted, it fooled and decieved. But she had scoffed at poverty too, thinking it only the realm of the lazy or weak, a New Darwinian method of execution. Couldn't ignore it when its hands clawed her empty stomach, when its lips had trailed ribbons through her reason and replaced it with a mimic of living.

Drink, sleep, wake. Mix and match as necessary.

It was real, and she needed to step out of this place that no longer smelled like air freshener now that the refills had gone out. She only slept when it was light, between classes, sprawling out on benches and in computer labs, pretending to be a graduate student with a term paper. Some days she never got out of bed, and he didn't notice because it was his night time. Or was that a month ago. Everything felt cold, so it was hard to tell the season in the dark.

If only the shell of a woman in the mirror would stop looking at her like that.

\---

You hear the music, but you can't tell where it's coming from. Maybe some day you'll find the jukebox, but for now it's just the ambiance, some horrorsurvival game in the frontal lobe. You walk forward anyway, and it follows you, but you've learned to live with it. The voice says _in here_ and you make your way to a stool. They don't even notice you, you're so quiet, you wonder if you're dead.

She says her name, but it only comes out as a cough. He hands her something poured from a plastic pitcher turned decanter and she drinks it fast so it doesn't burn.

The door creaks as someone else walks in, but you have your place at the counter, and the bartender doesn't usually pay you much mind. You're not ugly, but not memorable, so he asks for your ID but doesn't read it. A hand brushes your thigh and you jump. A nearly toothless man grins and offers to buy it for you.

_I’m gonna walk on up to heaven, I’m sure you’ll see me there._

You decline on the nature of such an offer, but part of you wonders exactly why not. Why not but she knows why, so you listen to her. They have paper cups and plates because the dishes haven't been done for months, it seems, the smell follows her--you--wherever you go. The man smells of a different kind of decay, as do all the others, so you find a scared rabbit kind of comfort in it.

You remember the first time you drank, how warm you got, how all worry melted away with your ability to decide whether or not to take your keys anyway and go. Out past curfew and working, the sixteen-year-old pulled the purloined bottle of rum from her trunk like she'd been waiting for the occasion. They let you pour and you poured way too much--more rum than coke and it tasted like sour and rotten. Awful. Like a lot of things, you get over the taste for the result. Lawyers and whores alike are aware of this kind of enlightenment.

_Might be the last dead man to make it, Hell yes, I know that I’ll get there._

You give yourself up to the kindness of strangers. Well, not really kindness, as all they see are the few things that you can offer, and all you can see is a way to another substance. After all, humanity has a long and colorful tradition of using substances to reach God, altering their minds so the divine can step in. So why shouldn't you? The authority figure of Law doesn't want you to gulp them down to ease the burning, but the authority figure that sleeps next to you after the graveyard shift mixes them for you.

She trusts that he's put in the right proportions and he tells her again that he can't taste it, the liquid doesn't satisfy. He's hiding the feminine curves of his face with cheap vodka and stubble. He is the man here, and she wonders what it would be like to not be the one to pass out first.

Eventually you wake up, as that wave of panic hits you. The clock tells you that you've stayed too long. Time to go home, cover up the evidence. You're supposed to share everything, _everything_ , but it's there, that rebellious part that wants to keep something. Besides, it's nothing much, just a few bottles of gin to go into the recycle bin and a few files to wipe from the computer. You're not an _addict_ because they sell their possessions and bodies for a hit, but you know you're close even if your high class mindset won't let you fall to that kind of depravity; it's no wonder that debutantes always take to the drink eventually, such is the clean state of oblivion.

_I will be wearing clothes of fire but I’m sure you’ll see me there._

He looks at you like a child or a misbehaving pet when you wake up. You feel guilty, even if you didn't do anything but cut your life expectancy down a bit. Never _unfaithful_ and never avoiding the self-temptations. You always come home alone, pass out on the couch. He's going to come up with new rules now, as last week he told you that you couldn't go to the store yourself; the Last German Beerhall on Fourth was just a temporary loophole.

Even still, he pours her a drink, from the Costco size of vodka. She looks at you and you don't look at her--too much. The disconnection is getting to be too much. One of these times you won't come back and then where will you be?

_I may be trailing you in ashes but you know that I'll be there._

\---

She used to think that the voices of ghosts were nothing more than hearsay, that the one she saw in the bathroom mirror with its long hair and hands clasped at her shoulders was her overactive imagination. And maybe if the haze of intoxication lifted, she could see it quite clearly; who was the ghost and who was the one going slowly mad. Who was the reflection and the one holding the rock that had smashed the mirror.

_He kept strange hours, locked himself away in his room before being seen shouting at the window. And, he had murdered his fiance - he sacrificed her for the purity of all mankind._


	7. Vertigen

If she opened her mouth in the water that surrounded her, she'd drown. So she kept it shut.

No one was speaking her language anyway, because her language died the instant she walked in the door. Maybe someday they would sing it in churches, maybe someone would use it as a dirge. There was no such thing as an independent woman when people talked with admiration in their voice for her accomplishments, but disappointment in their eyes at her simple wedding ring and lack of offspring on her hip.

When people talked, they lied. They couldn't help it, it was that fight against nature that the human mind always faced. She knew, deep down, that everyone was an animal, and animals didn't want for much. The dressings around it were all a way to get to nature, or to get away from it. Flowers were just little sexual organs, after all. Giving them to a girl was just a code.

But for now, she had music.

She could be silent, with the music, and no one would try to talk to her that way. Even with lyrics, music never lied, especially if she had no idea what the words meant. Ignorance was truth and truth was a close pulse to her eardrums, and a beat trailing down her neck.

It was how to be strong.

But when the lady at the grocery store tapped her on the shoulder, the illusion was shattered. Lady Sorrow of the House was standing before her, a baby resting on her shoulder. The cannned goods behind her turned it into some strange Icon, and she expected snakes at her feet and radiance from around her dark head.

"Can I help you?"

Lady Sorrow's syllables were fast and rolled off her tongue with foreign clings and clatters. She tried to keep up, but she could barely catch any words. The feeling of distance had to be mutual, for her large eyes were almost a reflection of steel grey, even if they were warm and brown. Even they couldn't speak to each other, when there could be so much to say.

She handed her a can, knowing it was the wrong one, and walked away.

\---

"We never talk anymore. You lay down and pass out every time I'm home, love."

"I'm just tired."

"You even forgot half the groceries. You just brought drinks back. We can't live off that."

He was just talking in tongues, the same refrain. If she opened her mouth, she would drown.

"I thought you were better than this, so independent. Why even go to all these classes so you can get a job, if you're never going to go to it? You're wasting _our_ lives."

If she opened her mouth.

\---

_Aquell matí em vaig llevar, no recordo on ni tan sols el temps que fa,i tot havia canviat. Però jo no ho sabia, encara, i més m'hagués valgut no saber-ho mai. El meu món era petit, però suficient, abans. Deixà de ser-ho. La meva vida, un cel particular, nul._

\---

She couldn't understand the words, and here she thought that she was smart. All this isolation was eventually going to undo the whole world.

\---

_That morning I woke up, I don't remember where it was, not either the weather outside, and it had all changed. But me, I didn't know it, yet, and it would have been better if I never knew. My world was small, but big enough for me, before. It stopped to be that way. My life, a certain sky, it's over the uncertainty, sweet loneliness._

\---


	8. Supreme

She wanted to say the blue collar experience was an experiment in sociology; that she hadn't really become white trash. That such a thing was a figment of the imagination, some illusion to pass the time between her idealized poor husband and her empty stomach. To think that class really existed was perhaps the greatest shock of all. To think that marrying into a lower one wasn't as charitable as she thought was what made her bitter until even his even-tempered soul wanted to shove her face into the carpet; it twitched when he spoke, she could see it. Throwing their TV trays aside as he emphasized all the virtues she was not sold the deal. At least she didn't have to defend the saints she kept in her pack of cigarettes, hidden in the backpack supposedly containing books.

'We are as we are, just dirty figments of the once high god, you realize.'

One didn't really become white trash until the Other recognized it; the hip sway, the sizing up of the minority--classy white girl to trash in just three moves. At the bus stop she could almost be an artist, but walking through the streets of the places the railroads forgot with her baggy pants and over-large t-shirts and hair not cut in what seemed like years made her one of them.

And he seemed too eager to let her meet the friend he'd made at work.

_Supreme talks about his baby's mother like a whore. Sweet 16 she is, with future uncertain, love incomplete. Soapy days for Jr. and she. At 3, Supreme comes to give his boy a pat and a pound, put his hoodie on the couch, his Timberlands up on the chair so his bitch can bring him a beer. So, this is the Nuclear family? Mommy, baby... and Daddy makes a mess of his baby's mother's hair as they fuck 'til her mother comes in from work._

Pay-per-view movie while the toddler wailed, and the hot dogs boiled on the stove; in another life, she would have flinched at that. When he looked at her, he always smiled; the good wife had come with him to see the perfect family. She tried to avoid the toddler's toys as he threw them, his mother avoided them in an oblivious haze. Maybe she would get some of what Mother Trash was on.

"So your husband says you're real smart, gonna make something and you'll be rich someday."

She hid the lip snarl with one of the hot dogs; tasteless boiled things. After a swallow she could respond to Father Trash, with some kind of decency.

"It's supposed to work like that."

She'd learned that trying to explain what her ambitions were just got blank looks and head pats. If she played the hand of Proud Intelligent Woman now it would just go without a call and no stakes. Conversation was a gamble anyway when she was trying to beat down the urge to strangle someone else's progeny.

"You should invest. I hear real estate is where its at."

If it were really that simple, Father and Mother Trash wouldn't be in subsidized housing, and she sure as hell wouldn't be talking to them. Her disgust would be an open palm instead of the tight fist burrowed into couch cushions. Charity and sympathy were much easier concepts when the filth of her own existence didn't bring bile to her mouth.

_She's playing house, he's playing man and Jr. is the only one who accepts he's just a child. Wild nights she had with a swish of her stuff, knocked up to a waddle, a baby carriage bustle and still gets her play. But her dream is true romance... well sorta, everyday from 3 to 6. Supreme leaves out before Mommy comes kick his lazy narrow behind back onto the street. He's not a corner boy. The bodega in the 40's is mid-block where bullets flock, no names engraved and he may be next. Shielded by the patron saint of the brothers. Being there is all there is._

It was harder to smile when he put his arm around her, with these Christian folk. They didn't offer anything for her to dull the under layer of violence that has built up within her, no liquor to sate the beast that hid behind her long eyelashes. These Christan folk with their dull-eyed wives never seemed to have what she needed to get through forced socialization and her own husband's parade of normalcy and she wasn't quite ready to steal it. The fact they meant well while their child ran rampant is what made the shake come back to her hand; how many people forgot about the now for the sake of the afterlife?

Mother Trash probably thought the afterlife was free pay-per-view.

She almost snapped when the toddler's toy hit the sweet spot at her temple. The place where she had wondered how hard she could push only three nights before. Her accent came unbidden with them; more geography than theirs, which came from long hours in the stockroom and getting knocked up at the prom. She managed to save all the venom for the boy, an innocent really, he couldn't help that his parents were only still children themselves. Play actors. The toddler didn't realize that her flash of steel grey was really a silent prayer that he be drowned before they molded him into something truly useless.

"I ain't really lookin' into real estate. Just hopin' ta git through school 'fore it gits much more hard."

Mother Trash blinked her googly eyes, and promised her son candy. Father Trash seemed more at ease now that the high speech was gone from her vocabulary, and the good wife was out. Because the good wife understood how best to respond to the hardworking folk, the disenfranchised real people that weren't hindered by commercialism like the places she had come from. They watched their televisions while their children tore up the house; her family had done so out of an inability to communicate. She was much better off with the simple folk.

"When you lookin' to start a family?" And her husband smiled the smile that preceded the cheap vodka brought to her before she had learned to need it.

_Living lovely without turning the corner, reaching for a swig brings sweat to his brow and shit to his mouth, dispelling knowledge on the stuffs, the pleasing things the baby's mother do, dousing the sidewalk with wretch of a boy/man, breaking Friday night to seek man/hood in a paper bag. Says, "Fatherhood is real cool and the kid looks like me so she better not let nothing happen to him or I’ma kill the bitch."_

Could she parody Mother Trash, the student girl-woman with the wild son? They used to call her dramatic with her big gestures and outrageous speech, her cockateel hair and predilection for costumes instead of clothes. But here in the subsidized house that smelled of boiled hot dogs and dirt she couldn't quite bring that up.

If the Other had deemed her White Trash, and Queen Nefertiti couldn't stand to look at her, then why the hell did she deny? If it looked and smelled like...

"Maybe in a couple years," he answered for her, taking away what could have been the performance of her life. Hadn't they agreed that her aristocratic body was unfit for the burden of breeding? Then again, three months ago he still pretended like the rings of sludge in the shower were his duty to take care of, not assumed to be her womanly care.

She had to remind herself that she'd asked for this.

"If at all," she added, letting a breath out like it should have been saturated with nicotine. She was hallucinating her ways out now, entertaining herself with a fiction that Mother Trash had revealed her stash behind the toaster and they were doing what all good future breadwinning wives did and baked their minds out of reality.

Such a child. Such a victim this way that she painted with shit.

_Sudden twitch to the roll of the wheel, trained steel stained blue puts punk on the wall for some trumped up call from precinct 101. Monday at 3, the baby's mother waits, Jr. in her arms, patiently at the door, doesn't know what she misses. Locked into the routine, a project queen. Supreme rode off into the sunset with a 3 to 6 all his own. Took a week for her to find out, a minute to promise devotion, her life on hold as Supreme calls checking on his boy (and the baby's mother). Life on the outside ain't even worth it. Shit. Who screwed whom?_

He squeezed her shoulder a little hard, reminding her of the way that TV trays flew through the air in front of her. Was implied violence as bad as the violence itself? Some old dead white guy had probably pondered that between his gay love affairs. Everyone knew that educated men wanted nothing to do with educated women.

"You two would make cute kids. With such blue eyes. You're like... what's the word for it?"

"Aryan."

"Yeah, like some kind of Aryan dream. Blond and blue-eyed pretty babies."

The blue collar experience had taught her the true currency was genetics; and she was fucking rich in that. Her Viking husband and her own heritage meant for the most envied phantom children. Her possible sons threw toy cars with Mother and Father Trash's one and only, but they were pretty at least. The stringy strands of blonde on her husband's head and her blue steel was the jackpot in any country and class. Even starving they could be royalty, if Whiteness was to be believed.

"World domination and everything." His gods hung dead on trees and hers were cackling over the bones of scapegoats.

_There’s not enough room in the pen for them both to stay locked into their little worlds they will. Leather gear, X skullie, Size 2 Docs. Man, Jr.’s the fliest shit in nursery care. Paid for by W.I.C., so who's getting dicked?_

It almost made intelligence a moot point, watching her phantom children wreck the subsidized house and burn the world down. She could practically drink the hunger in his eyes, realizing they were sharing the same vision for the first time in forever.

"Maybe."

She wondered how much cheap vodka it would take this time, for him to talk her down on her knees and then her back. The place a sensitive man like him never said but always hoped.

How much had it taken for Mother Trash to produce an heir?

_Who reigns supreme?_


	9. Chrome

In her need to find the source, the place that started the unhappiness and the voices and all the steady drips from the faucet of the sink filled perpetually with dirty dishes she forgot to keep an eye on the real villain.

\---

_So let’s be done with this._

\---

Violence has a way of sneaking up on a person. Coiled deep in the pit of the stomach, the tension in the wrists and neck. She wanted to know what malevolent force perched on her shoulder. She thought that maybe it was the place. She thought maybe it was the drink, a possession like the addicts she'd always read about talked of.

He thought of demons.

She stopped sleeping so that she was never vulnerable. Never uttering truths that could have easily been lies if she were fully conscious. They said insomnia was like the volume turned down but like so much experience was described more beautifully than enacted. It was a coil slowly releasing, willing. It was the pressure on the backs of her eyeballs, willing the disgust into glares that a person would have to be blind not to see.

"This is the third act, this is the twist, love."

"Just come to bed, you don't sound yourself."

"But it's in me, just like it's in you, when you stay your hand from striking. I think maybe you still see me as a child."

"Well you're young. You just need to get things out of your system."

He stood near the door, ready for work, ready for the requisite goodbye kiss that assured intimacy.

\---

_You said “I want you, I don’t want another, I want a girl who knows how to suffer.”_

\---

What place was there for all-consuming love when their physical bodies were wasting away? He had always attributed all good things to fate and all bad things to the devil, but what devil could live in this suffocating place and what fate gave a damn for dumb kids, anyway? She'd thought it absurd that he, once beautiful creature had chosen _her_ of all people, but then again, she had chosen him as well. If they were a drama they were reincarnated enemies that were atoning, and the atonement had been derailed because no one could really put down the sword. The eyes lied and the tongue bent into a passion play of thorns and dawn betrayals.

Sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the attack to come, even if she'd given up on sleeping at all. He had seen in her the ability to lose, the history of male and female relations coming down to a primal matter of dominance. He had wanted to penetrate all things but she had always been sharp.

There could be no other. Her one true enemy, his chance to play hero and the lasting impression was always violence. Physicality was just a series of stabs in the dark. If she took her fantasies to the streets the law would disagree, because the undercurrent of the destroyer set the lawful guidelines on edge. The world of straight line streets had no place for cycles and circles; even when wise men hallucinated mandalas that their wives had been seeing for years.

And the confrontation awaited if they were inevitable at all.

\---

_Chalk down my hands, I need to work the bars dry._

\---

She stood next to herself and examined the evidence.

There was a film developing on the counter of the kitchen, a residue of mildew and dust and pre-packaged helper meals. Long dirty blond hairs huddled in the corners of the floor as if they were trying to form their own new wig. Laundry piled next to condom wrappers, not at all coy about their meaning. Sediment in the tub basin.

There was no way that a good wife could show off this home.

She wet the sponge in the bathroom sink, wringing it to a careful dampness in her bony hands. The yellow was a shock next to the perpetual grey of a place always curtained in, but with enough light to give a false sense of depth perception. She nearly stubbed her toe on a discarded DVD case laying on the floor.

She applied the soap straight to the surface and wiped lightly. Perhaps she would need something stronger to remove it all.

\---

_So now you’re in the middle of someone terrible and you’re carrying a tiny crucible._

\---

"Get it out of my system? Get what out of my system."

She thought back on all the ways that she's broken the marriage vows in her head, and all the ways she hasn't in her actions and the math doesn't add up. She was the oldest twenty year old she knows and he was using that soft tone for children and old people. He was brushing back her hair, her heterosexually approved long hair with his calloused hands that spent more time moving boxes than creating art and she felt the sick feeling in her stomach.

"This whole bad girl thing that you're going through. I know the types of people you want to be with, the types of things you want to do."

She wasn't hearing him anymore, she was hearing this buzzing sound, this trickle of a thousand glass splinters that could almost look like water in the right light. She could see the girl suspended in all the promises, the lovely victim of a drowning as roses floated above her. She wanted to know why when the madness came, they always struck inward, instead of outward towards the real source. How many of the good ladies had committed suicides instead of murder.

Maybe villainy was just another word for autonomy.

"I don't think I can do this anymore."

She closed her eyes when he knocked the tray table to the ground, because the only way to wake up was to open them again.

\---

_Every raw boy want relief. You tough guys with the glass jaws, your pins, your backstage laws, your French positions, your stripper damage. It’s more than you can hide, more than you can manage._

\---

She took two trashbags of debris down to the trash room, avoiding the gaze of the neighbor next door. But then, the neighbor had never looked her in the eye, probably didn't see past the greasy hair and cheekbones anyway. She liked the way that their weight came off easy as she tossed them in the dumpster, though, and any small social offense was forgiven.

She peeked into the laundry room, disappointed that the Lady of Night's exaggerated curves weren't present, instead replaced with a hulking gorilla of a man. Instead of delicate unmentionables being handled by long red nails his large and hairy ones were tossing some blue collar shirts into the dryer haphazardly.

Trouble with the little woman?

But they didn't acknowledge each other, for men and women never acknowledged each other during the simple domestic rituals. She couldn't expect to see the Lady of Night every time. His large physique and almost childish hands reminded her of how _his_ looked holding a dish, and how that hadn't happened lately.

It had only taken her a half hour to clean the kitchen up, she didn't get the big deal.

\---

_I’m done with the dark boys, through with the dark boys, done with the dark boys, I swear you’ll be the last one. I’m done with the dark boys, through with the dark boys, done with the black cotton mafia._

\---

"I've sacrificed so much for you, came here for you."

She'd breathed a woman's name in her sleep and he started reading her mail. She stopped facing him in bed and he started to monitor her phone calls. Here and now, when the fight had actually risen in volume, now she thought of all the times and places that he had defused her anger with shame.

"And you can't do this anymore? We're bound, we're _one_."

One, two, three, it didn't matter how much counting happened, it didn't add up. One person, two bottles, three hours of tension. Didn't matter that he'd thrown the tray across the room, implying that she was just as light.

"This is marriage, this isn't something that you can just quit. We went before _God_."

Where was God when the food had dwindled to a block of cheese and the never ending cheap vodka in the economy sized plastic bottle? There was only room for one martyr in this tiny shit apartment.

"You're the only one I've ever loved."

_You want a girl who could suck the chrome._

He looked to her now with the anger masked by pious servitude in the way that his god wanted the humble man to be; worshipful masters of their domain. He whose ancestors had sacrificed their children on altars out of fear still had that desire for blood hidden behind the dance of civilization that he mimicked. His mouth said love, but his face said vengeance.

Her face said transgressions that he made up for her. But that wasn't true. In her mind she had traced the wire line of Tweet's tattoo with her tongue and had prostrated herself at Nefertiti's feet. She left this place behind and decked herself in fripperies and laughed in the faces of beggars. She had let them eat cake.

Funny how the detail of fantasy blurred reality so much that she hadn't realized what was happening.

\---

_You’re so rocked and wrapped in anguish, some little tragedy I’m slow to extinguish. Watching the suitors stagger home, now I’m butcher, now you’re bone._

\---

You look just as expected, like the arguments have always happened. You are wrong and he is right, and you can feel it on the tip of your tongue. The apology is waiting to be spit out, but it's caught in your throat. The sincerity is in your eyes, of course, because they are as hallow as you are, and there can only be sincerity there.

You walk into the kitchen. He follows.

You feel small in the corner next to his height, even if he's gotten thin in all this time. This is where he assures you that he'll always forgive you and understand you. This is where he holds you and you hold your breath in anticipation and to mask the smell of his sweat. This is where the status quo begins.

But _she_ whispers in your ear, and you look at the counter. You see it, even under the food particles and dried noodles that were bought months ago. You reach for it.

Intellectually speaking you know it doesn't take much pressure to break skin, know it doesn't take much force to pierce muscle. You'd watched the appropriate movies and read the inappropriate books. You know the blood won't gush out, but it splatters more than you expect. You know it will hurt more with the dirty knife you've used.

You know that you are just a small girl and he is a grown man, so you are quick when you stab him again.

It's out of shock that he hardly makes a sound at first, and once he's down after the first couple you go for the throat so that his reactions will only be as loud as his struggles. You think that the neighbors will mutter about the married couple going at it again, oh those young people.

You straddle him, even though you were quick enough. Losing that much blood in such a short time would take down anyone.

When the sounds go back to normal, you realize that your breathing hadn't changed the entire time. In the corner Death is looking at you with a smile, and you can't help but think that she's probably the most beautiful woman you've ever seen.

\---

_I’m done with the dark boys, through with the dark boys, done with the black cotton mafia. I’m done with the dark boys, through with the dark boys, done with the dark boys, I swear you’ll be the last one._

\---

Despite knowing where they had been, she puts gloves on to pick up the used condoms. The bedroom was the last place to clean, because it's current state made her sneeze too much. With every other part of the apartment cleaned, it would be pointless not to include it too. She turned a clean shirt into a mask and picked through the piles on the floor with delicacy.

It was here that the lost things were hiding; that band t-shirt that she had been missing for months, this bracelet she had thought about wearing a couple weeks ago. Since the body was in the living room she could take the heavy covering off the window.

In the sunlight, the bedroom didn't look sinister at all.

\---

_It’s documented, tequila scented. You want a girl who’s pale and bled, you want a girl who’s easily led. Her slim hips, your tight grip, tell me it doesn’t hurt just a little bit boy. Come on, copy, she doesn’t read you, she fed, fed the hand that bit her, she doesn’t need you. Your fill-in girls, your soft metal foxes, your white receipts, your big, black boxes. Life doesn’t mean telling lies, it means enduring what you despise._

\---

She pawned her grandmother's ring for her Greyhound ticket and had enough left over for whatever else she might need for a while. This time of night the homeless were huddled on the benches, but she could blend in enough that they wouldn't hassle her. After all, she wasn't carrying much.

She stared at her hands and wondered if the guilt would show eventually, if it would appear at all. Metaphorical blood on the hands was much more effective than the real kind--it hadn't taken too terribly long to wash it off, especially with the bathroom finally cleaned. She thought that she had left the apartment looking very nice, considering. The landlord wouldn't have to do anything at all in order to sell it to rent it to the next dumb young couple.

If the sun would rise soon, it would almost be just like the movies. But it wasn't.

Maybe in another time, she would have been leaving on the boat and her husband's body would be propped up on the widow's walk in some macabre joke. Or maybe she should have bought the train ticket instead. It was more romantic that way.

But here in the bus station with all the other drifter souls, she could finally relax. Maybe it would be hours before they found him, the blood drained out and carefully poured down the drain, his eyes left open so that he could see the salvation he had always talked about. Maybe it would be days. Maybe weeks.

"Hey lady, how about some change?" He smelled of the haze she'd been living in. At least he didn't lie and tell her he wanted to buy food.

She handed him a wrinkled twenty. "Get yourself something nice. The cheap stuff can be murder on your liver."

\---

_I’m done, I’m through._


	10. Black Box Part 2

Maybe she found herself waiting, watching, knowing that he would show up somewhere. Maybe she was waiting on a ghost, some reminder of the things unsaid that _needed_ to be said.

It was colder here, and it would probably always be colder. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of the air; clear, fresh, uninhibited by the goings on of human dramas. There was a faint smell of train on her coat but that would go away when she had time to launder everything.

"They'll catch up with you eventually, that was a crime you know. You turned me into a victim."

She almost smiled. Maybe she really had always been just a little crazy.

"And why would I give a fuck what you think anymore."

 _This_ was where she belonged, somewhere far away from rivers and beer halls and ill-fated husbands. Such an anti-climax really. She'd never had the opportunity to decide to live; she only reacted to the realization that someone had to die and decided that it wasn't her.

"You're just a voice in my head anyway."

Such a quaint little town. If the shy look of the girl outside the grocery store was any indication, this was going to be very interesting.

_We only got a very brief glimpse but you really felt you were seeing something nobody had seen before. I got really afraid, my heart missed a beat. I felt this had already happened but I was about to see it again...._


End file.
